I was first involved in virtualizing SAP in 2007, when SAP first offered support for deployment in VMware’s hypervisor. The project was for a large government department in New Zealand. Since then I’ve been involved in a number of large scale SAP deployments on VMware, mainly around Asia Pacific and Japan region. Back then we were trail blazing, and we knew it. But we took a methodical risk based approach and ensured we tested everything adequately (especially performance), the result was it worked just fine. These days virtualizing SAP is much more mainstream. But now we are about to take on the next generation of extreme workloads, which will deliver even more massive business benefits than virtualization by itself has, here I’m talking about SAP HANA and VMware’s vCloud Hybrid Service.
Yesterday (21st May 2013) VMware and SAP made a major announcement that deepens and strengthens their already existing strong strategic global alliance. The companies jointly announced that they would provide production support for SAP HANA, SAP’s revolutionary in-memory database platform, on top of VMware’s vCloud Hybrid Service (public cloud), and for on-premiss (private cloud) deployment in VMware’s industry leading vCloud Suites. But wait there’s more!
VMware will be the only company able to sell SAP HANA One Premium through a monthly subscription model with full production support deployed on either vCloud Hybrid Service or vCloud Suite for on-premiss use. Although SAP HANA One might be available on AWS currently it is not supported by SAP. This is a major benefit for the VMware solution as it has SAP’s full support. Numerous other SAP solutions will aslo be available and fully supported by SAP and VMware on VMware vCloud Hybrid Service and vCloud Suites on a subscription basis in addition to SAP HANA, such as SAP Business Objects BI Platform, SAP Data Services and SAP NetWeaver products. SAP ERP Data Services product allows customers to integrate on-premiss data with cloud offerings. The support provided by SAP for the VMware vCloud Hybrid Service extends the existing production support that customers have enjoyed on VMware’s hypervisor platform since 2007 for the SAP NetWeaver products.
SAP Solutions on the VMware vCloud Hybrid Service are expected to be available in the United States in Q3, with the Hybrid Cloud Service available in other regions of the world at a later time. SAP HANA production support on VMware’s vCloud Suite for on-premiss deployment is available in addition to the existing support already provided for other SAP Solutions. VMware will provide full production support for any instances of HANA exceeding 64GB including the standard T-Shirt sizes based on 10 vCPU’s per 128GB RAM. In addition a flexible T-Shirt size of 64 vCPU and 819GB will be supported by VMware to make full use of the vSphere 5.x capabilities. This size is expected to support the requirements of more than 90% of SAP ERP environments. This extended support is expected to be available from Q3/Q4 2013.
I recommend you read the joint press release titled VMware and SAP Collaborate to Deliver SAP® Solutions as a Service on VMware Cloud Infrastructure and The Wall Street Journal article VMware to Offer SAP Software Within Its vCloud Service regarding the announcements.
In addition to what has been announced now VMware and SAP will continue to collaborate and innovate jointly to bring additional solutions and options to market for customers in the future. This is likely to be an incredibly bright future with both SAP and VMware fully standing behind these solutions. There are significant ROI, performance and availability benefits that customers can achieve from migrating off traditional Unix platforms to VMware vCloud Suite on x86. If you’re running SAP solutions on a traditional Unix platform, on a competing x86 hypervisor, or on bare metal x86 systems now is the time to talk to SAP and VMware about migrating your SAP solutions to vCloud Suite. If you’re a new customer thinking about implementing SAP solutions why not enjoy them on a subscription basis with the flexibility to choose to deploy them either on-premiss or in the cloud? Only SAP when combined with VMware gives you that option!
Many customers have already virtualized SAP on VMware’s platform and achieved incredible savings and benefits. Documented success stories include some of the largest SAP customers in the world. Just take a look at one example, EMC’s Propel Project, where EMC has migrated off Oracle ERP to SAP. The environment provides a total of 1 million SAPS with 448K SAPS for production. All from just two vBlock 700’s. This is just one of 70 public success stories VMware has of customers running SAP solutions on their platform. I’ve presented many of the available case studies at events around the world, including case studies of customers migrating systems of IBM System Z Mainframes, SAP environments from just over 100K SAPS to over 2 million SAPS.
The bottom line is if you’re not virtualizing SAP with VMware you’re being left behind and if you’re competitor is already doing it they will be reaping the rewards while you are missing the opportunities.
Final Word
Based on my experience successfully helping customers Virtualize Business Critical Applications, including SAP Solutions, deploying on VMware’s vSphere Platform and vCloud Suite (and when available vCloud Hybrid Service) is less risk than running on any other platform. Especially when you consider the inflexibility and lack of agility those platforms offer that translates into slower IT response and lost business opportunities, in addition to the unnecessarily high CAPEX and OPEX costs. Girish Manmadkar has a good article on the VMware Consulting Blog titled Virtualize SAP – Risky or Not?, it’s definitely worth a read. If you haven’t already done so now is definitely the time to start planning the migration of your SAP solutions to VMware’s platform. This article will be the first of many I write with regard to virtualizing SAP that will be aimed at helping you architect your SAP solutions on VMware to ensure success. It’s all about the apps, and it’s all about making sure you meet the business requirements when virtualizing without compromise.
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This post first appeared on the Long White Virtual Clouds blog at longwhiteclouds.com, by Michael Webster +. Copyright © 2013 – IT Solutions 2000 Ltd and Michael Webster +. All rights reserved. Not to be reproduced for commercial purposes without written permission.
Interesting development; as you seem to have the inside track, I have a question around availability: the press release seems to indicate dev & test support is available with on-site deployments, and prod support for 64GB off-premise (vCloud Hybrid-hosted) instances only – nothing bigger.
The wording in your post (paragraph 4) is somewhat ambiguous and seems to indicate otherwise – prod support for on-premise deployments of virtually any size. Do you have any references I can use to back those claims with customers, or am I just not reading properly (again)?
That is correct. Support by SAP on-premises and on Hybrid Cloud for up to 64GB. VMware will then support beyond 64GB. It should be published in a KB. Once I see the KB I will reference here. It's possible that it will all start from the same time in Q3/Q4 2013 as per the press release Hybrid Cloud Support. This wasn't clear in the press release. Existing support arrangements till then.
I’m interested in the current database and concurrent User limit of SAP on VMware. Also, is there anything other than the OSS notes that indicate you must turn off all over commitment in VMware to be supported. My concern is that there is so much hype around ‘cloud’ that even if it is not the best choice for the SAP application. The inbuilt ahead of their time, load balancing and memory management features in the SAP kernel since R3 are really the VM/Cloud features. Are we buying the same thing twice?
Hi Len, There is no limit other than what the physical hardware can provide. Current supported maximum host size is 12TB RAM, 480CPU threads and 16 sockets, with largest VM being 4TB RAM, 128 vCPU. Also the over commitment is not a supportability issue, but a starting point recommendation. It assumes that you will run your systems at 100% utilization, which we both know is not the case as we generally size for 75% maximum utilization. I know of systems designed for many millions of SAPS and hundreds of thousands of concurrent users that are running on VMware. Virtualizing SAP is much more about improving service levels and availability, and also improving performance, while reducing risk, complexity and operational costs. It can also make the landscapes much more agile, with the use of tools right out of the hypervisor box but also such as Landscape Virtualization Manager, where you can dynamically create new landscapes, or add resources, such as dialog instances, to existing landscapes on demand. This really cuts down on overall project costs and project durations, which is where the real dollars can be saved and business benefits can be had.
I don't think you're paying for the cloud features twice, but without those features you can't do non-disruptive hardware changes, maintenance or upgrades without some impact to the applications. It's much more complicated to do DR, and much harder to automate and ensure consistency. This is really what you're paying for. The hypervisors will only load balance resources if there is competition for resources, and this achieves better overall performance and service levels for the applications. If there is no competition for resources, then there is no load balancing necessary. Given that 85% of SAP's internal systems are virtualized on vSphere, there is no reason why their customers' systems can't be. If everyone moved to x86 (which is a transition picking up rapid pace, 68% now running on x86), then SAP could virtualize the last 15% too, as they wouldn't need to support the legacy systems any longer.
For App Servers in particular, dialog instances, central instance / ASCS, 2 socket servers are a great choice as they can easily scale out to fit any sized landscape. Also Hyper-converged platforms are a great way to reduce complexity in infrastructure, so you can focus on applications. Hyper converged infrastructure gives you cloud like on demand hardware that you can control in the applications team, resides in your datacenters, and you can directly integrate with. Also frees up capital that can then be invested back into the applications where the real benefits are. This would not be possible without virtualization.